Tuning In: WEEI's Phil Zachary eats up Holy Cross ties

Friday

Oct 11, 2013 at 6:00 AMOct 11, 2013 at 9:39 AM

Bill Doyle Tuning In

When Phil Zachary takes charge of WEEI Sports Radio (93.7 FM) on Oct. 21 as vice president and market manager of Entercom Boston, he won't have to be reminded that WVEI (1440 AM) in Worcester is an affiliate.

Zachary, a 1976 graduate of Holy Cross, knows all about Worcester.

"I love Worcester as much as I love Boston, if not maybe a tad more," Zachary said.

Zachary especially loves the Italian breakfast of two eggs over easy with sausage, red gravy and Italian bread at the Parkway Diner on Shrewsbury Street.

"Best breakfast in America barring none," Zachary said.

In fact, when Zachary attended an HC reunion a couple of years ago, he ate at the Parkway three times in two days.

Zachary, 59, will leave as COO of Curtis Media Group, a 25-station radio network based in Raleigh, N.C., to join Entercom as the replacement for Jeff Brown, who departed last month to take a similar position with Cumulus Media in Atlanta.

Zachary, a native of Middletown, Conn., worked as a disc jockey and program director for HC campus station WCHC, then as an intern at WTAG (580 AM) in Worcester during his senior year, providing news and sports reports and playing music from 4 p.m. to signoff at 1 a.m. He began his professional radio career by filling in as a news announcer for WAAF, which was then based in Worcester and is now one of four Boston stations that he will oversee.

WEEI's ratings have fallen well behind the Sports Hub (98.5 FM) in recent years after the station reigned as the undisputed sports king in Boston for quite a while. Zachary said he does not see himself as WEEI's savior.

"It's not going to be 2007 again," he said via telephone from Raleigh. "I don't know what took anyone so long to put a second big sports station on the air up there."

Actually, other sports stations were formed to compete with WEEI, but failed because of weak signals and a lack of the financial support, problems that CBS Radio didn't have when it debuted the Sports Hub in August of 2009.

Zachary said if Raleigh can have three sports stations, there's no reason why two can't thrive in Boston.

Asked if he expected WEEI to return to No. 1 in the ratings, Zachary paused, then replied, "I think we'll compete for No. 1. I think there will be an ebb and flow depending on who's got what play-by-play, what teams are hot."

When Zachary started his radio career, which also included stops in Boston, Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, stations received ratings only twice a year. Now stations get them 13 times a year.

"It's dizzying," Zachary said. "Arbitron in their infinite wisdom has figured out how to create 13 months out of 12."

Zachary expects WEEI's ratings to soar as long as the Red Sox remain in the playoffs, but he admits they could fall off for a while afterward.

"One of my challenges and one of my goals," Zachary said, "is to make us great between the play-by-play segments. I think too much has been made of who's affiliated with whom. We need to do great sports talk regardless of the season."

In cost-cutting moves under Brown's watch, "Big Show" host Glenn Ordway was fired in February, and the station dropped the Celtics, who moved on to the Sports Hub. Program director Jason Wolfe was also let go in August.

"I'm looking forward," Zachary said, "to giving WEEI staff the kind of confidence and encouragement that they need to do good work."

The contracts of John Dennis and Gerry Callahan, co-hosts of morning drive Dennis & Callahan, expire next year, prompting some to wonder if they'll be next to go.

"When you have talent," Zachary said, "that's that good, you do everything you can to keep them around. I have nothing but respect for those guys. There's been no discussion about the next to go. I know there's been an awful lot of turmoil there, but I'm hoping my arrival will settle things down a little bit."

Unlike the Sports Hub, WEEI has affiliates in Worcester, Providence and Springfield, and Zachary said he wants to make better use of them.

"We have to pay more attention to those listeners," Zachary said. "It's not like you're driving three hours. It's 45 minutes to get from Boston to Worcester. We need to do appearances there. We need to have people touch our personalities and get to know them, and the listeners in Worcester need to know that our personalities care about them and that community is very important to us."

Zachary also wants to market the station's website, WEEI.com, by showcasing its reporters on the air more.

Contact Bill Doyle at wdoyle@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillDoyle15.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.